The China Bird

by Bryony Doran

  Her aunt wanted her to take some Siberian Saxifrage. She had been digging up a clump for herself when Rachel came back from the barn and because she’d dug up too much she insisted that Rachel took some too. Her aunt had never been interested in gardening, so why was she taking this plant?

  ‘It was the only thing that I brought with me, along with myself, that has survived. So it’s coming with me.’

  Rachel hated it. The big green tongues flat to the ground and the failed promise of the pink stalked flowers. She thought the saxifrage would probably be happier in suburban Bournemouth than in the flower border up against her house. Many times she had been tempted to dig it up, but it reminded her of her uncle, and so she kept it.

  She never saw her aunt again. They exchanged Christmas cards for ten years. After that, she presumed her aunt had died.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  The air is yellow and heavy with floating dust particles. Angela sits in Edward’s chair under the skylight and basks in the sun. She closes her eyes and falls gently into slumber; just for five minutes. When she wakes the sunlight is gone. She shivers, just like when she woke the last time they were here …

  When she’d asked him to lie down on her granddad’s blanket he’d grumbled as usual. He always seemed to enjoy a good grumble. Hadn’t she even thought to bring a duvet to put underneath to soften the impact of the floor on his poor bones?

  ‘Please Edward, it won’t be for long, I promise. I just want to do a few quick sketches.’

  ‘Help me get down then. Hold me from behind so I can give myself a bit of leverage.’

  She’d sketched in silence. It was a good pose. Edward lay on his side with his legs slightly bent, his arms folded across his chest, his body slightly curved. The light from the window behind her caught the most prominent part of his back, accentuating the irregularities, casting the flatter side into dark shadow. She’d realised after a while that Edward was unusually quiet. It had made her feel suddenly ill at ease. She took her eye away from his back and glanced upwards to his face. The glint of something on the side of his nose caught her eye. Puzzled, she glanced again. Whatever it was, it was moving. She realised with horror that he was crying. Silent tears slid down the side of his nose and dripped onto the grey army blanket, forming a darkening circle.

  She returned her eye to his spine, smudged a little with the ball of her thumb, looked again, still the tears were there, the damp patch on the blanket increasing in size. I must keep drawing, she thought to herself, he will know if he can’t hear the scratch of charcoal. She traced the lower part of his back, the flat roundness of his buttock. A slight movement made her change her focus. Protruding at an almost exact right angle from his body was his erect penis.

  She had wanted to put down her board and run out of the room, out of the building, away from this man. What was Edward doing with an erection? Why was he crying? She could pretend not to notice. She grasped the back of her neck with her free hand. That week she had cut her hair and she missed the warmth of it on her neck.

  She continued to scratch with the charcoal in the bottom corner of her paper. Her hands shook too much to continue drawing. But if she could keep drawing maybe his erection would subside and he could manage to regain a degree of dignity. They could pretend that this had never happened. She looked up. If anything, his erection seemed to have increased. He was still crying. She felt her own eyes fill with tears. She stood up, bent over him, stroked his hair, shuffled her way inside the curl of his body until they lay together like two spoons, his tears wetting her newly-shorn hair, her taking his penis, wanting it inside her.

  She shivers to herself, if only she could have drawn them, lying there together. Angela O’Donnell, you’re strange. She looks at her watch, 3.30 p.m. She hears the first spatter of rain on the skylight. How long should she wait? The man at the library said he would give him the message if he phoned or came in. She should have returned the following Saturday instead of going off to Cornwall. Had he been here waiting for her? Like the time they had that row and she had waited for him for two Saturdays in a row. Well, serve him right. She had almost convinced herself that she wouldn’t need Edward to sit for her again. She could manage, she supposed, but it didn’t feel quite complete, not yet. She needed to add something. What, she was not sure.

  There is a knock at the door and like a scalded cat she jumps up from her chair. ‘Come in,’ She notices her voice is trembling.

  The caretaker puts his grey head round the door, ‘Be locking up in a bit, duck. Have you got a key?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Another five minutes then, eh?’

  ‘Excuse me?’ she calls after him. He puts his head back round the door. ‘Have you been here all day?’

  ‘Yeah, off and on. Why?’

  ‘Have you seen a man with a stick?’

  ‘That hunchback fellow that comes?’

  ‘Yes, that’s him.’

  ‘No, can’t say I have.’

  ‘What about last week?’

  He shakes his head. ‘No, but he was here a few weeks back, the beginning of the month it was. I remember because it was my birthday. He was walking along the corridor singing to himself. I nearly shouted after him, how about Happy Birthday?’

  Angela smiles, ‘I know. I was here that week too.’ She zips her portfolio together and both zip ends meet at the handle.

  ‘Artist, are you?’ I shall miss it when they finish the rebuilding up at the art college. I’ve enjoyed having you lot down here.

  She nods and picks up her portfolio. Yes, she thinks to herself, I am an artist.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Edward spends all week in the flat, going out only occasionally after dark to buy provisions, and even this he wouldn’t do if he didn’t need food for the cat. He lies in bed all day waiting for the darkness, only getting up to feed Tabitha or to go to the toilet. He wishes he had a curtain to cover the glass in his front door. He leaves the curtains in both his bedroom and the lounge drawn all day. As darkness falls he opens them and pulls his chair up to the window to watch the city at night. He notes the changing of the traffic lights from red, to amber, green. He watches the cars stop by rote as they advance up the hill, slowing as they meet the red lights.

  He is fascinated by the blue light of an ambulance and, from where he sits, the silence of its night-time siren. Every night the ambulance takes the same route out of the hospital before branching off to its final destination along the ring road. He waits for the return journey, but knows he can only make that out if the blue lights are lit for the immediate and the dying.

  On the way up the hill he passes the doctor’s surgery. Maybe the doctor was right; perhaps he should have taken the Prozac. But he wasn’t depressed. It was just that he needed time to adjust. Something wonderful had happened in his life. A beautiful young woman had wanted him to make love to her. He stops to rest, shivering himself deeper into his coat. All week he hasn’t bothered to wash or shave, and on one of his night time forays he’d caught sight of himself in a mirror. He’d stared back at his reflection, and put his hand up to his face to feel the stubble that he saw. He’d looked like a tramp.

  When he gets home he must have a bath.

  After he has fed the cat he sits down at the kitchen table. He feels too weary to have a bath. He has been lost to the world for one whole week and who has noticed? He wonders if he would be in this state if he’d gone to York, if he’d never got the cat. She looks up at him as if reading his mind.

  ‘Well at least you love me, don’t you puss?’ Is this what he is afraid of? That Angela does not love him? Pity, that can be the only reason why she had done it. The word is finally there, forming in his mouth: ‘Pity.’ He covers his face with his hands and groans. The groan softens to a hum, one long drone trying to drown out the emotions that swirl inside him. If only he could hold them, examine them, find somewhere to put them down when they became unbearable. He holds his hands a short distance apart, i
magining a ball of glowing light between them, a sphere of twisting blues and purples. It warms to his touch, gives him pins and needles in his finger ends, making him weary.

  He wakes up. The cold of the kitchen table has soaked into his cheek. He looks at his watch, two o’clock. He gets up and goes into the lounge to stare out into the darkness. Tonight there is a full moon, a poacher’s moon, misty and ethereal. He will go to bed. Try to make a new start in the morning. He could even go to York for the day. Why had he not thought of that before? He goes to close the curtains and then thinks better of it. It will give him courage in the morning if he leaves them open.

  He stands at his bedroom door. Tabitha is already curled up asleep at the bottom of his bed. He wishes he had slept all night at the kitchen table. The darkness, and the cold of the sheets on his skin, bring back the yearning two-fold.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  As a child, there was a sadness in the house that Rachel could never quite fathom.

  Sometimes a deep depression would descend upon her mother and she would stay in bed for days, only getting up in her nightdress in the early morning to do her piecework. She said the rhythm of the sewing helped to soothe her nerves. Rachel would lie in bed listening to the hum of the sewing machine. Her mother was a pocket hand. She sewed pockets into the suits that her father cut and brought home from the factory. If Rachel listened carefully she could tell the style of pocket her mother was making. Slow short bursts and then silence as she mitred the corners, and then two very quick bursts as she tacked the tongues of the welt to secure them, and then the long bursts as she attached the silesia bag meant she was putting in a welted pocket. Patch pockets were one continual steady burst, like sawing wood, as she attached it in one skilful, juddering flow.

  When her father got up to go downstairs, Rachel would hear the whine of the sewing machine change as her mother pushed in the big black button to turn it off followed by her slow steps ascending the stairs. Rachel knew then that her father would soon call her to come and get breakfast.

  At these times, if she was not at school, Rachel’s father would take her to work with him and at lunch times, and on the way back home, he would take her to the corner café and order them bacon and eggs, or liver and onion casserole. Food she had never experienced before her mother’s depressions; food that she, like her father, found delicious. When he finished his meal he would sit back in his chair, pat his stomach contentedly and sigh, ‘Now that’s what I call proper food.’ Then he would lean forward across the table and whisper conspiratorially, ‘Don’t tell your mother, that’s a good girl.’ Rachel liked these secrets. It made the food taste even better.

  ‘You women,’ her father would tell her. ‘Why can’t you learn to cook food other than what you were brought up on? Is it so difficult? My mother was exactly the same. She was French, you know? There’s a lesson for you, lass. Always marry your own kind. Causes much less trouble in the end.’

  Rachel would often pester her father to tell the story of his childhood and of her grandparent’s romance. My father, he would begin, your granddad, was a fabric buyer. He must have been good at his job. A gentile working for a Jewish haberdasher was very rare in those days. He was often sent to Europe to purchase silk and on one of these trips he met your grandmother, married her and bought her home. When I was fourteen, Father died. He wasn’t even cold in his grave before my mother had packed our bags. You see, he said, she’d always hated Leeds. I suppose she was homesick for her own country.

  As she grew older, Rachel learned that her father had refused to return to France with his mother. She had found him an apprenticeship with a Jewish tailor and, as soon as he was settled in lodgings, she left. He never forgave her. She often wrote to him and begged him to come to France to visit her, but he remained in Leeds where he married the boss’s daughter. A boss who, until he announced that he’d fallen in love with his daughter, had treated him like a son. Strangers off the street were witnesses at their wedding, and on their first night he carried his new bride across the threshold of the house they were to occupy for the rest of their lives.

  The letters from France went behind the clock on the mantelpiece. They were still there, most of them unopened, when Rachel cleared the house after her father’s death. She put them in her handbag and on the train home she read them.

  She discovered that her French grandmother remarried and had a daughter and that when the daughter was in her early twenties, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, a rift had occurred between them and the girl had run off with a Jewish artist twice her age. Rachel’s father was urged to visit his mother now that she was all alone in the world.

  Rachel wrote a letter to the address at the top of her grandmother’s letters. For a year she heard nothing and then she received a letter from Manchester, in a hand she didn’t recognise. It was from a Claudette Mason, informing her that her grandmother had died five years previously and that she was her father’s half-sister who had come to live in England during the war. She now lived in Manchester. They corresponded regularly, gradually building up a picture of each other’s lives until one day, several years later, Rachel went to Manchester to visit her.

  Rachel would have given anything for Claudette’s house. Not for the size or location, but for the life, the experience, the knowledge, the culture all held there between the walls. Claudette was quite elderly and walked with the aid of two wooden sticks, which, when seated, she placed together as a pair to one side of her chair. Rachel could still see the remnants of great beauty in the woman’s face; the high cheekbones, hair pulled back into a soft bun and streaked like a horse’s mane, eyes dancing with humour and intelligence.

  The two women had tea, and Rachel asked about the rift between Claudette and her mother.

  The muscles in Claudette’s face stiffened. ‘It was sad for her, maybe, but not for me. She was a very hard woman. I was better away from her.’

  ‘And the artist?’ Rachel asked.

  At this, Claudette became wistful. ‘Ah! Isaac. How I loved that man, and his work. I’m not sure now which I loved the most,’ she laughed. ‘It’s strange how things turn out. I have a friend who comes to visit me, well, she is also my cleaner actually, and with her she brings her granddaughter, a girl of seven or eight and, you know what, that child, of all the books I have, that is the only one she wants to look at; the book of his work. It’s almost as if he’s come back from the dead to poke me alive. To say, don’t forget me. When the Germans invaded we were living together. One day when he went to the shops they arrested him. I learned this from the baker. I never saw him again. I packed a few things and fled with my life. I came over here and I waited for Isaac to follow. After the war I went back and searched for him. I heard that he’d died in a concentration camp. When I finally believed he was dead I came back to Manchester and married Mr Mason. I’d met him soon after I arrived in England. He was a kind man, an English teacher who helped me with my language. At first I didn’t love him. I thought I could never love anyone as I had loved Isaac, and that was true. But one day I woke to find that a relationship I had expected so little from had brought me great happiness and contentment. We found so much in common. Ours was a gentle love, a love of quiet happiness.’

  ‘And what of my father? Did you never think to find him?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘I often thought of your father and one day, a year after my husband had died, I travelled by train across the Pennines to Leeds. I never knew before that England had such wild and dramatic countryside. The only clue I had to your father’s whereabouts was an address that was pasted on the side of an old trunk of my mother’s. That address was burnt on my brain, so I couldn’t forget it. ‘33 Green Mouse Street’. What a strange address that is. I found the house but no one could remember my mother or her married name. So I had nothing left to go on. All I knew was that your father was called Richard. I don’t think he ever wrote to my mother. All we got was a card at Christmas written in a woman’s hand unti
l one year, for some reason, maybe my mother had asked for it, a photo of him. Just him, none of the rest of the family. There was also another brother, you know? A child my mother had in her old age when I think she thought she was too old to have any more children.’

  ‘Did he die?’

  She’d shrugged, ‘I never knew him. He was sent away, put in a home. There was something wrong with him you see. His body was bent and twisted. It was rumoured that the child couldn’t have been my father’s because he was already in a wheelchair by then, disabled by a stroke.’

  ‘And your mother let the child go?’

  ‘It was done in those days. I think she used to visit him because every year she would go away on her own to the coast for a week. Somewhere I have some photos of her with this boy grasping a bucket and spade to his twisted body. So she had the three children. Your father when she was twenty-one, me when she was forty-one and the other when she was fifty-four. Maybe I should have tried to find him after my mother died, but as you say in this country, I let sleeping dogs lie. You have a son, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I have a son.’

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Alex stares at each drawing intently, holding each one out at arms length. Sometimes he goes back to look at one he has already studied. He says nothing. Angela wants to say something to lessen the tension, but she feels unsure of her ground. She has never seen him this serious. She stares out of the window, watches the crows circling the black branches of the trees on the brow of the hill, waiting for him to speak. A bus is making its way up between the houses. Still he says nothing. She watches him, studies how his brow corrugates into a frown; his legs crossed, one moccasin dangling loose at the heel.

  He glances up at her, and then back down at the page where Edward lays curled into himself, his hump pulling off in a different direction, ‘I don’t know what to say. This work is outstanding, totally, absolutely!’